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Political background

The Spanish Regiment of Hibernia, ca 1740; foreign military service remained common for Irish Catholics until banned after 1745

Irish Jacobitism was principally the ideology of Catholics, whose demands included religious toleration, legislative autonomy for Ireland and land ownership; especially the reversals of the Cromwellian confiscations of Catholic land the mid 17th century. These issues pre-dated the Stuart cause and continued long after it ended. Nevertheless, "the claims of the exiled house of Stuart remained, for several decades after the Treaty of Limerick, the primary political allegiance of the majority of politically conscious Catholics"

There was also a minority Irish Protestant Jacobite tradition among "doctrinaire Protestant clergymen, disgruntled Tory landowners and Catholic converts", who generally opposed Catholicism but still considered James Stuart to have been unlawfully deposed by William. Some Protestant clerics became Non-Jurors, the most famous being propagandist Charles Leslie. However most Irish Protestants opposed James II and his successors on the ground that they would "utterly ruin the Protestant interest and the English interest in Ireland".

Historian Vincent Morely writes, 'Jacobitism was the dominant ideology in the political literature of the period but it was a distinctively Irish Jacobitism that emphasized the Milesian ancestry of the Stuarts, their loyalty to Catholicism and Ireland's status as a kingdom with a Crown of its own.' In 1715, for instance, poet Eoin O Callanain described James II's son James Stuart as "taoiseach na nGaoidheal" or "chieftain of the Gaels".

There was much enthusiasm among the literate Catholic community in Ireland when James assumed the throne and appointed Tyconnell, a Catholic, as Lord Deputy of Ireland. In 1685, a Gaelic poet Dáibhí Ó Bruadair welcomed James as the 'true king', who would ensure the supremacy of Catholicism and the Irish language. While another, Diarmuid Mac Sheain McCarthaigh celebrated the fact that Catholics and 'Gaels' (native Irish) could now bear arms and serve in the army and assert dominance over the previously ascendant English Protestants.

However, there were considerable tensions between the goals of the Stuart kings and those of their Catholic supporters in Ireland, which surfaced when James called an Irish Parliament, dominated by Catholics, in 1689 in order to fund his war effort. Both Charles I and Charles II had viewed Ireland as subservient to England. James II conceded demands of the Irish Parliament for autonomy, with great reluctance, but refused to repeal Poyning's Law which stated that laws passed in Ireland had to be approved by King and Parliament in England. He also retained the legal preeminence of the Protestant Church of Ireland, though he acceded to Catholic demands that landowners would in future only have to pay tithes to clergy of their own religion.

The most contentious issue between James and the 1689 Parliament was land. The proportion owned by Irish Catholics had declined from 90% in 1600 to 22% in 1685, owing to the Cromwellian confiscations of mid century.. The Parliament voted to confiscate the estates of 2,000 "rebellious and treasonous", mostly Protestant, Irish Williamites, with the aim of granting them to Catholic Jacobite supporters. James did not want a restoration of Catholic landowners that would "dissatisfy his Protestant subjects in England" but the Parliament made it clear that they would not vote him taxation unless he consented.

James' departure from Ireland after the battle of the Boyne in 1690, after which he told his supporters to "shift for themselves" led to some Irish Jacobites deriding him as "Seamus an chaca" (James the shit) who had "lost Ireland" and deserted his loyal followers. However, according to historian Brendan O Buachala, James' reputation subsequently recovered as "the rightful king who was banished from his kingdom but who was destined to return and recover his patrimony". While upper-class literati such as Charles O'Kelly and Nicholas Plunkett portrayed his apparent desertion of his followers as the fault of "corrupt English and Scottish advisors".

Jacobite defeat in 1691 led to legal formalisation of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. The measures passed by the 1689 Parliament were annulled and 14,000 Jacobite soldiers went into exile. Although they soon ceased to exist as an autonomous force, service in the French Irish Brigade remained common among Irish Catholics. About 1,000 men were recruited for the French and Spanish armies annually, many of whom had a "tangible commitment to the Stuart cause". before recruitment for foreign service was banned in 1745. Units of the French Irish Brigade aided the Scottish Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745.

Until 1766, the Stuarts nominally controlled the appointment of Catholic clergy in Ireland but their residence in Rome meant these were largely made by the Vatican; Irish Jacobitism became characterised by militant Catholicism.

Despite the defeat in the 1689-91 war, Irish Catholic support for the Jacobite cause persisted in the first half of the eighteenth century. O Buchalla describes the legitimacy of the Stuarts as an "unquestioned orthodoxy [...] in Ireland James was looked on, by the Catholic majority, as their saviour" Historians have argued that the championing of the Stuart cause in Irish language poetry, especially in the province of Munster, as well as persistent recruitment to the Irish Brigade in France, showed that Jacobitism was a popular cause among both the remaining Catholic gentry and the common people. They have argued that the persistence of Jacobite rhetoric and symbolism among rapparees (bandits) and recruits for foreign service as well as serious pro-Jacobite rioting in Dublin in 1724 suggest the resilience of popular support in Ireland for a Stuart restoration. Fears of resurgent Catholic Jacobitism among the ruling Protestant minority meant that the anti-Catholic Penal Laws remained in place for most of the eighteenth century.

However, the fact that there was no uprising of Irish Jacobites in parallel with those in Scotland in 1715 or 1745, has led other historians to argue that this, "should suggest caution about how far rhetorical Jacobitism reflected support for the Stuarts as opposed to discontent with the status quo for religious, national or socio-economic reasons".

After the demise of the Jacobite cause in the 1750s, Many of the remaining Catholic gentry renounced support for the Stuarts, creating organisations like the Catholic Convention who worked within the existing state for redress of Catholic grievances. After the death of Charles in 1788, the remaining Jacobites cast the French First Republic, Napoleon Bonaparte or subsequently Daniel O'Connell in the role of liberator previously occupied by the Stuarts.

Recent writing has tended to argue for the importance of Jacobitism in Ireland which, "percolated down to the lower echelons of Irish society" and "which principally sustained Irish Catholic nationalist identity between the Glorious and French Revolutions". But others argue that Jacobitism was part of "a pan-British movement firmly rooted in the confessional and dynastic loyalties ... [and] attempts to establish a direct line of succession leading to the [Irish] nationalism of the Victorian and Edwardian era are misconceived"